Qualcomm Stadium site in SDSU's sights

Research facilities, housing considered in parking lot

DETAILS

San Diego State University: Founded in 1897, the roughly 300-acre campus is the largest university in the county, serving about 35,000 students.

Qualcomm Stadium: Built in 1967, the 71,500-seat stadium is surrounded by 120 acres of parking lots and an adjacent practice field.

San Diego State University would expand its campus three trolley stops away in Mission Valley under a plan being discussed by school and city officials.

Where exactly? At the 166-acre Qualcomm Stadium site.

The proposal, which is preliminary but quickly gaining support, would not affect the stadium where the Chargers and Aztecs play football. It does, however, call for displacing some of the 18,000 parking spaces to make way for student and faculty housing, research facilities and a riverfront park.

Mayor Jerry Sanders and SDSU President Stephen Weber have begun discussions in recent weeks on the possibility of the university using the land as a solution to significant problems at the city and the university.

Since the Padres left for Petco Park, Qualcomm Stadium has been a drag on the city's bottom line, losing $12.5 million last year. A lease or sale to the university could reverse those numbers as the city faces perpetual budget woes.

The university has wanted to expand for years but is landlocked on its 300 acres south of Interstate 8, about two miles east of the stadium. The trolley connects the stadium and the campus, partly alleviating concerns about traffic.

“As we're looking at some options for different things, I think this one makes some sense,” Sanders said. “There's some beauty to it in some ways where we've got the biggest parking lot west of the Mississippi and we could have the front door to San Diego State there.”

The proposal isn't without problems. Parking spaces would be replaced with structures. And no construction could begin until the city resolves contamination issues beneath the city-owned stadium.

The city has sued Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, owners of a fuel tank farm that has seeped petroleum into the ground beneath the stadium and its parking lot, to speed the removal of the contamination. The cleanup has been bogged down in regulatory and court hearings for 17 years.

Sandy Goodkin, a real estate consultant and analyst, said a campus expansion is one of the more interesting proposals he's heard for future use of the site. But Goodkin said he doesn't see where the money would come from or how the university could overcome critics of its previous development efforts.

The stadium site “is something that I think the people think belongs to them, and they're going to be very finicky about who would come in and take it over,” said Goodkin, who recently served as a board member for the SDSU Research Foundation, a nonprofit auxiliary.

Murray Galinson, a former California State University trustee and chairman of the board of San Diego National Bank, is credited with bringing the proposal from the water cooler to the negotiating table by getting Sanders and Weber together.